Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

It's the amateurs that tend to be the first to discover unknown stuff like comets and stuff. The professionals are in general engaged in directed research and do not have the time to be poking around random areas of the sky to see if anything interesting is going on there. As someone mentioned, David Levy is himself an amateur.

Actually, "It was thought that the planet served to partially shield the inner system from cometary bombardment. However, recent computer simulations suggest that Jupiter doesn't cause a net decrease in the number of comets that pass through the inner Solar System, as its gravity perturbs their orbits inward in roughly the same numbers that it accretes or ejects them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter#Interaction_with_the_Solar_System [wikipedia.org]

Yes, but in your rush to denigrate people who believe differently than yourself you did.

Certain ideas are ridiculous, and SHOULD be attacked, so that we can realize that they are ridiculous and move on with life. As it is, it was a mildly funny joke and should not have attracted passing comment. Nobody should care when an AC with bad grammar calls them out.

I think it's clear at this point that the earth wasn't made in a week, and religious fundamentalists are trouble.

It's not a vacuum cleaner, it's gravity isn't so powerful as to pull other objects out of orbit per se. Sure, it probably gets hit more than other planets, but that's not that impressive. It fills less of its Hill Sphere than Earth does, so it's more likely to scatter a passing object than absorb it. And a recent study by Grazier and Newman demonstrated that it probably is taking more pot-shots at Earth than it is protecting us.

I like this quote a great deal. I took the liberty of smoothing the English only a little, while keeping the essential translational word choices the same. I humbly offer it:

Dilettantes! Dilettantes! - so they are called, who are occupied by a Science or an Art out of love for it, per il loro diletto, with disdain by those who do it for profit, because they love only the money which can be earned by it. This disdain is based on the dastardly conviction, that nobody would ever seriously take on a subject if not urged to it by distress, famine, or another greed. The public is of the same spirit and thus has the same opinion: from here comes its respect for "people of the trade", and its mistrust of amateurs. In reality, for the amateur, the subject is the goal. For the tradesman, it is only a means. Only he who is immediately interested in the subject and who is occupied with it out of love will carry it on with earnestness. From those, not from the paid servants, have the greatest achievements ever begun.